This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Rust and Bone author Craig Davidson finds grace in violence

Toronto’s Craig Davidson is the author of Rust and Bone, a short story collection adapted into an acclaimed new film starring Marion Cotillard.

“There are people within society that I came to notice had circumstances a lot worse than mine, but they seemed to deal with it nobly,” says Craig Davidson. (RICK MADONIK / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo

Last week, Craig Davidson leaned toward his computer inside the Mississauga offices of the bodybuilding periodical MuscleMag, where he is a senior editor, and read aloud the subject line of an unread email.

On Davidson’s desk sits a stack of MuscleMag back issues and a framed picture of his infant son Nick, eyes closed, flipping a middle finger. The 37-year-old is broad-shouldered and tattooed and speaks through ripples of soft laughter with a humility befitting a writer who has spent more than a decade nursing a career near-ready to explode.

The movie, helmed by French director Jacques Audiard, has generated buzz in this year’s heady awards season, earning two Golden Globe nominations last week, including one for Best Foreign Language Film.

The dissonance is unmistakably rich: a self-professed “blue collar” writer moonlighting at a niche fitness magazine while an adaptation of his stories becomes an onscreen art-house darling. But with a jump in international sales of Rust and Bone, a contract to ghostwrite a biography for a major author and a new novel out next year, MuscleMag is not in the writer’s short-term plans — not with money on the table.

“For a long time it was a struggle,” he says of his career. “And now it’s not a struggle. I know that when the wave is cresting you try and ride it for as long as you can before it kicks you.”

Indeed, the Toronto-born writer’s spasmodic and, at times, frustrating career has taken him from the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he earned an MFA in 2006, to Calgary, where the careworn freelancer scraped together a living as a librarian and bus driver for people with special needs, back to Toronto, where he wrote fake profiles for a dating website, to Fredericton, for an in-over-his-head deputy editor job at the alt-weekly Here. He took the MuscleMag gig last year to earn a steady paycheque after his girlfriend Colleen got pregnant.

In the midst of it all, Davidson wrote a first novel, The Fighter, which was well-received but described by his own agent as “a flaming car that drove off a cliff.” As a way to get inside the head of his doped-up main character, Davidson underwent a punishing 16-week steroid cycle and sold an essay about the experience to Esquire for $10,000. He published another short story collection in 2010.

Rust and Bone, written when Davidson was a graduate student in his mid-20s at the University of New Brunswick, seems so long ago. Populated by desperate brawlers, boxers and rough men, the eight stories are relentlessly brutal. Despite his middle-class upbringing, Davidson found a voice in characters existing outside the margins, striving for respectability yet beaten down by broken livelihoods.

Over the years, the struggling writer came to empathize with these men. Davidson sees himself among a breed of author that treats writing less as a lofty pursuit than a way of earning some hard coin. A “working Joe,” he says. Like his characters.

“There are people within society that I came to notice had circumstances a lot worse than mine, but they seemed to deal with it nobly,” he says. “I’m more interested in the working class because it seems like a more honourable existence in some ways.”

“It’s a bit of a conundrum, actually, that he’s so immersed in this world,” says Lynn Henry, a publishing director at Doubleday Canada who is editing Davidson’s new novel, Cataract City, expected to be released in late 2013. Henry calls Davidson an otherwise “totally lovely, mild-mannered guy.”

As for Rust and Bone, Davidson — who still passes the first draft of everything he writes to his father Don — insists the stories contain scenes written with a force and confidence he’ll never again match. They were written, he says, as “an angry young man . . . without fear.”

“I think of those stories as a baseball analogy,” he says. “You’re just sitting at home plate and you’re just taking the biggest home run cut at everything that comes over the plate and you don’t care if you look stupid.”

For the film, Audiard, who optioned the book four years ago after receiving a French translation as a gift, cobbled together the plot lines of two stories: “Rust and Bone,” about a washed-up hardscrabble boxer, and “Rocket Ride,” the tale of a killer whale trainer at a fictional marine theme park who loses a leg in a performance accident. Audiard transformed the trainer into a woman, played by Cotillard, developing a love story between the two characters.

Where some writers might view this as a bastardization of their work, Davidson, ever modest, considers the move an improvement.

“It’s brilliant,” he says of the movie. “It’s in most every way better than the book.”

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com